


Home is the Sailor

by SylvanWitch



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Enemies to Lovers, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Misunderstandings, Modern AU, Rough Sex, brief scenes of torture, casefic, coffeehouse AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 01:21:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29074008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Charles Vane has done his best to build a reasonable substitute for the life he lost when theNassauwent down.  He has the crew of the coffeehouse, customers who like him, and enough work to keep his mind from the memories of what he left behind.  All of that changes when Captain James Flint enters the picture, dangling Vane as bait to hook a shark of the criminal underworld--and hooking his heart in the process.  What happens when the man he was meets the one he wants to become?Or, theBlack Sailsmodern coffeehouse AU you didn't know you wanted and certainly never asked for.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Charles Vane, Past Captain Flint| James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	Home is the Sailor

**Author's Note:**

> "Piratehouse Coffeeship," as it affectionately became known, started as a lark, a silly, ridiculous AU fulfilling the "warm bread and hot soup" box on my personal prompts bingo card. As is so often the case with my stories, it became something very different. I hope I've managed to do these two vicious, marvelous characters justice in some small way and that you enjoy their adventures in crime-busting and coffee-drinking.
> 
> The title is taken from Robert Louis Stevenson's grave epitaph: "Home is the sailor, home from the sea."

Charles Vane ran his coffee shop like he’d captained his ship: His crew did what they liked as long as they got the work done and didn’t run the business aground.

That said, it was the third day Chelsea had flirted with the broad-shouldered, ginger-haired, chisel-jawed guy with the sun-weathered skin, smattering of faint freckles, and crow’s feet, and Vane was growing impatient with it.

It wasn’t that she didn’t continue filling orders even as she chatted up the man.

It wasn’t even that his mouth seemed to soften around a smile now and again, as if she’d surprised one out of him, and he hadn’t known he could still do that with his mouth.

It was that—and this was difficult for Vane to admit, even to himself, maybe _especially_ to himself—he wanted to be the one to make the man’s mouth move like that.

And, if Vane had managed the habit of honesty thus far, he could admit he’d like to make the man’s mouth do other things too.

Generally, Vane wasn’t a hypocrite, and for all that Chelsea’s happy young voice grated on his nerves as she chattered with Mr. Calm, Cool, and Collected, he couldn’t very well say anything to her without drawing attention to himself.

“Boss?”

Vane reluctantly withdrew his eyes from the retreating form of the man, a view certainly as lovely in its own way as its opposite, to acknowledge Kip, who’d apparently been trying to get his attention for some time.

Kip huffed impatiently, “The bakery guy is out back, says he needs your signature.”

That probably mean Rackham had shorted them on ciabatta again, a problem becoming too regular to ignore.

Vane moved purposefully toward the back door as Kip resumed his place at the rear prep table, happier to be cutting things up for the lunch soups than having to talk to anyone. Taking the kid on had been a favor for a friend, but so far, Vane hadn’t had reason to regret helping Elly out, even if Kip was more antisocial than Vane himself.

An unfamiliar figure was leaning against the side of the Rackham’s Baked Goods truck. As Vane approached, he gunned his unfinished cigarette into a puddle of dog piss and straightened.

He was at least a half a head taller than Vane, his massive biceps threatening to burst his shirt sleeves, and he looked ready for whatever the coffeehouse owner was about to unleash.

“Kip said you wanted to see me?” Vane used the voice he’d employed a hundred times as a captain—apparently reasonable, unrufflable, the sort of calm-before-the-storm disguised as well-meaning indifference.

“Yeah, you need to take this.” A beefy hand thrust a paper at Vane.

Vane ignored it. He knew what it was—a contract agreeing to sell the building the Weathervane occupied and which he happened to own, though that wasn’t common knowledge.

The ground floor was entirely taken up by his café. The three floors above were apartments, including a small one in the front that he’d kept vacant as a safehouse in case of emergency. 

A woman named Eleanor, whom he’d loosely call a friend, was the building manager and super. She occupied the largest of the apartments at the back of the second floor.

Otherwise, the tenants were families and couples and single folks, all of whom appreciated the promise of low rent and reasonably swift maintenance and none of whom asked any questions about their landlord.

Rackham had been trying to buy the building from him for weeks now, to no avail. Vane wasn’t interested in selling. He was even less interested in Rackham’s grandiose schemes for gentrifying the genteelly shabby neighborhood in which the building stood.

He’d made that point clear to a series of successively larger and more insistent underlings.

Apparently, he needed to make it again, perhaps more pointedly.

“No thanks,” Vane said, circling to the behemoth’s left. The big guy failed to follow his motion, which is what Vane expected—Musclehead didn’t see Vane as a threat, a mistake most people only made once. “The building’s not for sale, and Rackham knows it.”

Musclehead might have shrugged, but it was hard to tell, since his shoulders morphed seamlessly into his lower jaw, with no differentiation left for a neck.

“Rackham says you sign, you sign.”

Vane sighed, as if he were deeply disappointed in Musclehead for some minor social faux pas. Then he rabbit-jabbed the guy in his right ear, feeling his knuckles pop and the bright flash of pain even as Musclehead bellowed and dropped to his knees like a felled ox.

Before Vane could finish winding up for a low blow with his pointed leather boot, a shadow fell across the downed thug, and Vane looked up to see the mystery man from the coffeeshop standing six feet away leveling a gun at him.

“Huh,” Vane said, putting his hands up casually to show that he, himself, was armed with nothing more than rapier wit and a powerful right jab. “Something wrong with your coffee?”

Mystery man didn’t react to Vane’s words, looking at him but speaking to the groaning guy working his way unsteadily to his feet.

“Is there a problem with the delivery? Did you perhaps fail to give Mr. Vane his full complement of ciabatta?”

Vane was a goddamned coffeehouse professional and former old salt, so he absolutely did not whimper at the frisson of desire that raced down his happy trail at the Italian word rolling fulsomely off the tongue of Big, Broad-shouldered, and Butch, there, but it was a near thing.

The thug used the side of the truck to haul himself up, but his unfocused eyes suggested he wasn’t going to remain standing for long.

“I asked you a question,” the man said. He made it sound like a cheerful ultimatum, at the end of which was a period or a bullet, and he didn’t much care which the thug chose.

“Jack said this guy owes him money. I came to collect. Nothing wrong with that.”

There were several things wrong with it, as far as Vane was concerned, but he was more interested in hearing how the other man was going to handle it, so he kept his mouth shut. 

One incisive eyebrow rose in an expression of profound skepticism, and finally, he addressed Vane directly.

“This true?”

“Nope.” Vane popped the “p” to make a point.

“Didn’t think so.” He returned his attention to the thug, who was slowly working his way toward the driver’s side door. “Tell Rackham to forget it. He’s not getting anything from Vane here. And call a cab—you’re in no condition to drive.”

“Can’t leave the truck here.”

The man looked at Vane. “You need anything from it?”

Vane shrugged. “Rackham’s been shorting me ciabatta for weeks now.” Among Rackham’s many efforts to coerce agreement out of Vane, he’d shorted him on orders of baked goods and intimidated most of the conveniently located other bakeries into not selling to Vane.

This had required Vane to send further and further afield for bread, rolls, pastries, and the like, which had not only been irritating but had begun to cost him more than he could reasonably afford to spend on ciabatta.

“Take what’s yours, then,” the man suggested, surprising Vane. 

It wasn’t that he was opposed to a little petit larceny in pursuit of the principle of the thing. It was that this guy was the one suggesting it: Vane couldn’t figure his angle. Never one to question an unexpected treasure, however, Vane shouted for Kip.

When the kid appeared, scowling at Vane, Vane directed him toward the back of the truck. “Four dozen ciabatta, a rack of mixed cookies, a half-sheet of brownies, and four loaves of the whole grain.”

“Hey!” the thug cried, but it was a weak effort at protest. He had a thin stream of blood trickling from his ear and was looking green around the mouth.

Vane was anxious to get out of the alley before the puking started: He’d witnessed enough of that on shipboard to last him six lifetimes.

“Buy you a cup of coffee?” he heard himself asking, not having let his brain catch up with his mouth.

The guy, who had made his gun disappear when Kip had shown up, shrugged and said, “Sure.”

To the thug, he said, “Stay here. I’ll send someone to pick up you and the truck.”

The thug looked like he was going to disagree, but his effort was interrupted by a heave. Vane grimaced and gestured the other man through the back door, rushing him a little to get out of earshot of the retching.

He strode through the kitchen like he owned it himself, gave a smile to Chelsea as he passed behind her to exit the counter area, and settled at a corner table in the back that had a clear sightline to the front and rear door and no neighbors for two tables in any direction.

It was the post-morning-rush lull. In an hour, things would start to pick up for the early lunch crowd, but for now, it was relatively quiet.

“We’ll have the usual, Chels,” Vane ordered, settling in next to, instead of across from, the other man. He wasn’t putting his back to the door, either.

The man smirked to show he knew what Vane was doing and then put out his hand, “Captain James Flint,” surprising Vane not at all. The guy radiated authority, so it figured he was a law enforcement officer of some sort.

Vane hesitated a fraction of a heartbeat, tempted to say, “Captain Charles Vane,” in answer. As always when he thought of his old life, there was a sharp twinge in the region of his heart.

Then he took Flint’s hand and said, “Charles Vane. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

A sardonic eyebrow was all the answer he got until Chelsea had set their drinks down in front of them and sauntered off at a not strictly efficient pace.

This close, Charles could see that Flint’s eyes were like the sea before a storm, the kind of green that warned of heavy times to come. A finger of desire worked its way across the small of his back.

Ignoring it, Vane asked, “So, what do you do, Captain, besides charm my staff and threaten people with your gun?”

“I’m an at-large investigator for the state,” he said, explaining almost nothing.

“Investigating what? Out-of-control bread prices? The yeast crisis in North America? Gun thug standards?”

That earned him a thin smile, the kind that didn’t reach his pretty eyes.

“Let’s just say it’s in your best interest to cooperate with me.”

Vane had never appreciated authority for authority’s sake, and even wrapped in such an intriguing package, he didn’t find it particularly appealing now, either.

He let his unimpressed expression say it all.

“Look,” Flint softened, trying a different tack. “Rackham’s gotten in over his head with some bad people. This scheme of his to buy up the neighborhood and convert it into trendy lofts and day spas isn’t original to him. He’ll see a share of the profits, but he’s not the money and power behind the project. I want the man pulling Rackham’s strings.”

Vane nodded, having already come to the same conclusion about Rackham’s sudden evolution into a developer. He had, after all, honed his instincts on the high seas, where the rule of law often had to do with who was stronger, not what was right, just, or fair.

“So?” he said. “Where do I come in?”

Flint turned his hands up on the tabletop, like he was emptying them of any responsibility for Vane’s involvement. Vane didn’t buy it for a moment.

“You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Right, and you just happened to be staking out my shop, waiting for one of Rackham’s goons to show up and threaten me. What was supposed to happen? I was going to cower in terror, and you were going to sweep in and rescue me?” 

Vane snorted to indicate what he thought of that scenario.

Flint shrugged. “I’ll admit, I was impressed by the way you handled yourself.”

“Bullshit. You knew my name, and it’s not because it’s on the health inspector’s certificate behind the register. You’ve got my file. So, answer my question: Where do I come in?”

Flint’s eyes had narrowed at the bark of challenge in Vane’s voice, but after a long moment, he relaxed a little, nodded to himself, and said, “I need you to bait the trap.”

“And you figure a guy like me is going to agree to that?”

Flint’s hail-fellow-well-met smile grew a little jaundiced around the edges.

“I figure,” Flint answered, “a man like you looks out for number one.”

The attraction he’d had for Flint before was quickly waning now that the man was talking.

Flint went on, voice hard, “Rackham’s not going to stop with threats, and you know it. When he gets desperate, he’ll come at you hard. You can’t be here 24/7 to protect the place. And eventually, Rackham will send someone with more brains than muscles, with a gun and a pointed request, and what’ll you do then? I want to draw out the big guys, find out who’s behind this and take them out of the equation. You happen to be my best chance of doing that.”

“It’s nice to be wanted,” he answered, thinking of his own plans to take care of the Rackham problem. He wasn’t going to tell this arrogant cop about the sawed-off under the register and the .38 with the serial numbers filed off in his locked desk drawer. 

And though he wasn’t keen on being chum to draw out the bigger sharks behind Rackham’s latest enterprise, Vane was even less enamored with the idea of earning more of Flint’s attention by refusing. Captain Flint was just the kind of man who didn’t take no for an answer.

“Fine, but I get a say in how you use me. And you leave my staff alone.”

At that, Flint’s eyes made a deliberate slow pan to Chelsea, who was busy cleaning the filter on the espresso machine. When Flint’s eyes returned to Vane’s face, they were accompanied by a knowing smirk.

But Flint didn’t say anything else. He slapped the table with one hand and rose in a fluid motion, all business now that the dealing was done.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said. “Rackham won’t like what you did to this last one. He should increase the pressure soon. I have some resources to pull together. I’ll call you later.”

Vane wasn’t thrilled with being on-call to Flint, but then, the whole situation was untenable. The sooner he got this done, the quicker Flint would be out of his life. If the Captain disliked him based on what he’d discovered about Vane from his file, what he’d find if he really dug around in Vane’s past…well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

Vane would suck it up for the sake of his café and his crew, and then he could go back to the quiet life he’d had before Flint had inserted himself into it.

Captain Flint offered him a mock salute and sauntered away. Vane enjoyed watching him go, not only because he was sick of the man’s smugness but also because the rear view was truly exceptional.

Not that he had any intention of following through on the thought. 

Vane spent the lunch rush distracted, and the third time he burned his hand on a hot plate, he decided he’d be better off elsewhere, so he retreated to his tiny office tucked between the kitchen and the restrooms.

It was a space that never failed to remind him of his cabin on the _Nassau_ , his last ship and the only one he’d owned outright. She was a 200-foot fishing trawler built in the Netherlands in the mid-80s. He’d kept the superstructure as a front, but he’d never trawled for fish in his life.

Mostly, he’d carried cargo on the _Nassau_ , and he wasn’t too picky about what that cargo was, either. He’d fitted her out with secret chambers a-plenty and mounted guns and a sonic cannon on her decks to keep away the pirates.

Sometimes his cargo was extralegal, and occasionally, said cargo included people, though only individuals and small groups seeking refuge or fleeing life-threatening circumstances. If now and then his human freight were escaping justice, well, Vane wasn’t in a position to judge.

He’d drawn a hard line, though, at filling his hold with humans trafficked for profit or fed into the brutal wage slave system that chewed up illegal immigrants and spat them out when they were no longer strong enough to clean toilets or press shirts. Even smugglers have standards.

At any rate, his office was long and narrow, with a single, small window high on the back wall. It wasn’t round, but it reminded him of a porthole, particularly when the afternoon light in the service lane behind the café poured through the dirty glass, as it was doing just then.

Sighing, Vane rubbed his eyes and put his desktop in sleep mode. He’d been trying to balance the accounts for the week, but his mind kept straying to Flint: Was he going to call that night? Would he want to see Vane again right away? What, exactly, did Flint expect of him?

His libido suggested increasingly lewd answers to that last question, suggestions Vane ruthlessly crushed.

Kip’s knock on the doorframe brought him out of a particularly vivid fantasy of Flint on his knees, squeezed between Vane’s spread legs and the edge of his desk, those broad shoulders bent as Flint sucked him off.

“What?” he barked. 

Kip blanched, and Vane held up a hand in apology. 

“What do you need?” he asked in a more moderate tone.

“Shift change,” Kip offered, waving a hand behind him as he trotted off. Kip wasn’t much for social pleasantries.

Vane was surprised to see that it was already 4:30. Meeks and Slade would be prepping for dinner. 

The Weathervane Café offered a menu of soups, sandwiches, wraps, and salads, daily specials, and the predictable vast selection of the usual caffeinated beverages, both cold and hot. In terms of its menu, there wasn’t anything unexpected about his place.

What really recommended it, he’d been told, was the atmosphere.

The café was an homage to the life he’d left behind, from the brass fittings on the bathroom doors to the mermaid artwork framed like portholes, as if the patrons were in the bowels of a ship, being visited by legends while they answered email or browsed TikTok on the free WiFi. 

He’d drawn the line at seashell saltshakers, kept everything to just the right side of kitsch, and would never admit to anyone that he only ever wholly relaxed when he was on the warped wooden floors buffed to gleaming. Something about the way they gave and creaked beneath his feet laid his ghosts to temporary rest, at least enough that he could take a deep breath and not miss the salt burning in his sinuses.

In his earliest days after he’d abandoned his first and only mistress, he’d tried to make his way beside the sea, but he’d been driven inland by a steady sense that he had to escape what he’d been if he were going to survive.

Even so, in this land-locked city on the plains, he sometimes imagined he could hear the lapping of waves against an anchored hull and the gulls screaming in the rigging and feel the roll of the deck beneath his feet.

He would never be free of those reminders, but he’d learned to live with the specters of his past.

It was Monday, so the dinner crowd was predictably sparse, and Meeks and Slade had been joined by Billy, a kid built like a linebacker who could make the most delightful shapes in the foam and who charmed little old ladies and frat-bros from the nearby university and everyone else with his boyish smile and his big, expressive hands.

Not that Vane was going to involve Billy in Flint’s little project, but he could have worse help at his back in a pinch. Though Billy seemed gentle, Vane knew all about how appearances could be deceiving. He’d watched the kid offer a homeless man a ham-wrap Billy himself had paid for and had also seen him stand down a meth-head just by crossing his arms and scowling.

At that moment, Billy was chatting with a table full of co-eds who were giggling into their candy-flavored lattes and giving the kid not-so-subtle looks.

Vane smiled to himself to see Billy’s blush and then turned toward the storeroom: They were low on recycled wooden stir-sticks, and the turbinado sugar was getting sticky and needed to be replaced.

The bell over the door had the deep, brassy sound of a channel marker when it rang; he glanced, as always, toward the front, ever watchful.

The guy standing there letting in the damp evening air in was bigger than Rackham’s last loser, straining the limits of a thin wifebeater, the neck and pits of which were stained yellow with sweat. From where he stood, Vane could smell the steroid stench, and he took two cautious, long strides to put himself between the unwelcome visitor and the co-eds.

He wasn’t entirely surprised to feel Billy at his shoulder, nor was he remotely astonished to hear the flat rasp of Flint from behind the man in the doorway.

“I think you took a wrong turn at the corner—the porn shop is down next to the bus station.”

If being rescued by Flint was becoming tiresome, at least his heroics came with the lop-sided rogue’s grin he flashed at Vane when the big man registered Flint’s gun in his back and decided to take his advice about leaving.

“He’ll be back,” Vane noted, keeping his eyes on the space the bruiser had occupied and ignoring the way Flint strolled inside as though he was used to rousting violent giants from innocent coffeehouses.

“Didn’t take Rackham long,” Vane said, keeping his voice low as he passed Flint and gestured for him to follow. He wasn’t keen on inviting Flint into his sanctum, but he also didn’t want the conversation they were about to have to bother the customers or upset the crew.

“Desperate times…” Flint’s eyes raked the length and meager breadth of Vane’s office before he settled himself on a wobbly high stool Vane had been meaning to repair for at least a week. If it bothered him to have to balance, the captain didn’t show it.

“Did you know he’d be here?” Vane asked, using his chin to indicate the behemoth Flint had scared away from Vane’s door.

“I followed him from Rackham’s,” Flint confirmed. “Wanted to make sure Rackham was focused on you and not someone less capable of taking care of himself. Hell, blondie out there could have wiped the floor with Rowdy Roidy Piper.”

“My staff isn’t in the business of beating people up,” Vane answered mildly, refusing to rise to the bait Flint was so clearly dangling. “And they aren’t going to start now. I want them kept out of it. Entirely. This is a deal-breaker for me.” He settled on the edge of his desk, moving aside a stack of paid invoices he’d been meaning to file for a week now.

This close, he could see the way Flint’s life had worked its way under and into his skin—the shadows beneath his eyes and the laugh-lines around his mouth and that damnable scattering of pale freckles, absolutely ridiculous on a man like him, who had no business being so beautiful.

His red lashes fluttered as he caught Vane staring, and for the first time, Vane saw uncertainty pass across the captain’s face, a fleeting glimpse of what a more foolish man might call vulnerability.

Vane was no fool.

Flint opened his hands in a gesture Vane was already coming to recognize. It was supposed to be conciliation, to suggest that certain things were beyond Flint’s control. But Vane knew a lie when he saw it, and he wasn’t going to be led astray, even—maybe especially—by a man as virile and magnetic as Captain James Flint.

“What’s the plan?” Vane asked shortly, making it clear that his time was valuable, and Flint had already wasted enough of it for one day. If a little of his irritation was at himself for the ongoing pull of attraction he felt, well, Vane wasn’t going to acknowledge it.

“I’m not interested in putting his bully boys in jail,” Flint started.

“Or in the ground?” Vane interrupted, raising an eyebrow.

Flint’s look flashed from annoyance to speculation, replaced after a moment of parsing Vane’s expression with a dark sort of approval.

Flint nodded, acceding to Vane’s point. “If it comes to that.”

Vane grunted, hearing all the things Flint was carefully not saying about how it wouldn’t be a crying shame to get a few more sociopathic monsters off the streets. How sometimes justice was better served by looking the other way.

A frisson of mingled unease and desire zinged down Vane’s spine and lodged low in his belly, where it spread its tingling fingers.

Damned the man if he didn’t know exactly how to wind Vane up.

“I’m after bigger fish.”

Vane knew a thing or two about fishing, even if he’d never actually used the _Nassau_ for that purpose.

“You figure if we keep Rackham from getting what he wants, the guys he’s working for will lend him some…influencers.”

It wasn’t a question. Neither of them was pretending anymore not to know exactly how dangerous it would be to play the game they were discussing so casually. That there was a certain bloodthirstiness in Flint’s eyes reflected in Vane’s own, well…

Flint smirked, a triumphant little curl of his lip. “You’ve done this before.”

It was Vane’s turn to open his hands and shrug, the innocent, who-me-nothing-to-see-here gesture belied by a shark’s grin.

Flint murmured, “Well, well,” and the tingling in Vane’s belly roared into a furnace heat.

To diffuse the sensation, Vane said, “What do you want me to do?”

Flint’s smile grew wicked and hungry. 

“Besides that,” Vane said, acknowledging, at last, the tension between them.

If it disappointed Flint that Vane was resisting his not inconsiderable physical charms, he didn’t show it.

“How confident are you that you can fend off his hitters without me?”

Vane smirked. “How much latitude will your immunity give me?”

Flint nodded to himself, like that was the answer he’d expected. “Let’s say I’ve got the support of people a lot higher up the food chain and leave it at that.”

Vane had an inkling, then, that whoever Rackham’s bosses were, they were both more powerful and more dangerous than he’d at first suspected, or Flint’s bosses, also powerful and dangerous, wouldn’t have let a man like Flint off his chain.

A different man might have been frightened of the treacherous undercurrent in their conversation, but Vane had survived worse waters and had the healthy sense of fatalism to prove it. He’d been living on borrowed time since the _Nassau_ went down.

“If I’m free to defend myself in case of further incursion,” Vane went on, “then I can take care of myself.”

“No doubt,” Flint said, again in that low, dark voice that made Vane’s libido curl its fiery hand into a fist in his core.

“Stop that,” Vane snapped, his control fraying. “This is business, not pleasure.”

Flint stood up, and his broad shoulders shoved all the air out of the scant space between them. “No reason we can’t have both,” he observed slyly, hand resting lightly on Vane’s knee, thumb teasing the inseam of his jeans.

There _were_ reasons, plenty of them—excellent reasons, of the sort that Vane was typically quick to point out and might have, if Flint hadn’t stepped between Vane’s thighs, gripped him by the nape none too gently, and pulled him into a vicious kiss that drove both breath and will out of Vane in one sinuous swipe of the man’s talented tongue.

Vane was no passive damsel waiting to be plundered, though, so with his own shove he regained his feet and stepped into Flint’s space, thrusting his knee between those powerful thighs and pressing just so against the point of Flint’s interest.

Flint grunted and dropped his hands to his sides, a surrender Vane wasn’t stupid enough to believe.

Instead, he stepped back, taking in the flush high on Flint’s cheeks, the way his chest heaved and the satisfying bulge behind his fly.

“If and when this becomes something other than business, I’ll let you know,” Vane growled, marshaling his breath and willing his erection to subside. The former was easier than the latter, given the way Flint’s tongue ghosted over his lower lip as if gathering the last taste of Vane from it.

Flint’s eyes darkened, a sardonic smile turning his face saturnine, but he nodded in acquiescence, nevertheless.

“I’ll keep watch but won’t interfere the next time there’s trouble,” he said. “Do what you have to to send a message to Rackham that you won’t be easily cowed. Let’s see if he’ll appeal to his ‘patrons’ for more assistance. See if we can draw them out.”

Vane thought it was a flimsy plan, but conceded that Flint might know more about it than he did. Truth be told, Vane didn’t much care to know the particulars. He was being given permission to slip his own leash, just a little, to let the angels of his darker nature have their way. 

“Fine,” Vane said shortly, gesturing towards the door. “After you.”

Flint smirked at the summary dismissal but said nothing, only touched two fingers to his forehead in mock salute and exited, turning toward the back door instead of going out the front of the café.

Vane took a moment to breathe, rolling his head on his neck and loosening his shoulders, feeling the spent adrenaline seeping out of him, leaving an oily queasiness in its wake.

Squaring his shoulders, Vane stepped out into the hall and closed the door to his office firmly behind him. He had stirrers to restock and sugar to refresh.

Life at the Weathervane Café went on.

*****

In a past life, Vane had developed an almost sixth sense about surveillance. The _Nassau_ had spent only enough time in port to line up a new cargo, and it didn’t always happen that he felt eyes upon him that were more than casually interested, but often enough, he knew before the axe fell that someone was coming for his head.

Which is why, when he opened the Weathervane that morning, Vane was on edge, feeling a tightening around his throat as if someone were preparing to garotte him.

The skin between his shoulder blades twitched whenever he had to turn his back to the front door, and it was with some relief that he opened the back door to find Billy, Kip, and Meeks there.

While Vane wasn’t planning to get his crew involved in the Rackham business, he also didn’t want to put anyone in the line of fire who couldn’t handle themselves. 

Despite Billy’s having worked closing the night before, he’d agreed amiably to Vane’s suggestion that he swap the opening with Chelsea. The big kid had already proven himself useful where trouble was concerned.

Meeks, who had more metal in her face than Vane had in loose change in his pocket, could take care of herself, a fact she’d established on her third day of working at the café when a customer had directed a homophobic remark at her and she’d had an unfortunate moment of clumsiness with the steamer.

Kip kept to himself in the back, and his anti-social personality guaranteed he’d get out of the way the minute he saw a stranger coming. 

On the other hand, Chelsea was the idealistic sort, with a big heart that sometimes got her into difficulty with the handsier customers, who took her natural kindness as provocation for an unwelcome advance.

Of course, said customers never came back once Vane got done suggesting they find another establishment for their morning joe, but since he was pretty sure the next goons to show up wouldn’t be there just to pat her on the ass, it seemed prudent to give Chelsea some paid time off.

The morning rush was in full swing when there was a clatter from the kitchen. Vane, who’d been at the front of the store, ostensibly refreshing the bouquets on the tables but in fact keeping an eye on the street, loped across the café with ground-eating strides and pulled up short in the doorway to the kitchen, easing his head around the jamb to survey the space before stepping in.

Kip was nowhere to be seen, but there was evidence that he’d been surprised at work—red onion and diced cabbage were strewn across the prep counter, cabbage juice spattered in a parody of blood-spray against the backsplash of the sink next to the mess.

Vane ducked back and strode over to the register, where he gave Billy a significant look and eased the sawed-off out from behind the pile of clean trays they kept there.

Billy’s eyes widened a little, but he didn’t otherwise betray anything to the customer whose receipt he was handing over.

Vane kept the shotgun low against his thigh, using his body to shield it from the customers’ view, and returned to the kitchen, stepping inside cautiously.

A shattered jar of pickled beets added a macabre touch to the scene as Vane made his way around the butcher block table in the center of the kitchen and moved to the back door, which was usually locked but now stood open.

Just as he was regretting having kept Kip on for the day, he heard a hiss over his shoulder and turned to find the skinny young man jammed between the freezer door and the warming cupboard.

“Okay?” Vane mouthed.

Kip nodded and then pointed with a shaking finger out into the alley.

Vane pumped the sawed-off, a zing of adrenaline arrowing through him at the familiar ratcheting sound, and called, “If you’re pointing a gun at me when I step out there, you won’t live to fire it.”

He led with the snub-nosed barrels, hands steady on the stock and finger in the safety position beside the trigger.

As he’d expected, there were two men in the alley, both of them dressed in suit slacks, dress shirts open at the collar and jackets pooching where they carried their guns.

They weren’t built like the thug he’d smacked around or the roid-monster Flint had scared off the night before. One had a forty-something paunch, jawline starting to soften into a double chin and hair thinning in a quarter-sized spot at the top of his head. The other was younger, lean and wiry, maybe five-six, five-seven, with cool eyes and a steady, lizard-like gaze.

The alley behind them was taken up with a Lincoln Town Car so old-school stereotypical that Vane couldn’t help the snort of derision that came out of him.

He shook his head. “I hadn’t heard _Goodfellas 2_ was filming in town.”

Lizard-eyes gave him a slow blink that planted a seed of ice in Vane’s belly. The other one offered a thin smile and put his hands out to either side, “We don’t mess with the classics, Mr. Vane. You shouldn’t either.”

“Which is why I have this,” Vane answered, indicating the shotgun.

Older Guy nodded. “I’ll admit, you have a compelling argument. Let me counter with an offer: You give Mr. Rackham what he wants, and we won’t have to come back here at closing time to persuade your staff to make you see reason.”

Vane wished he hadn’t already racked rounds into the chambers because he sorely wanted to punctuate his look of cold anger with that satisfying sound.

“I’m not going to play the threat game with the hired help,” Vane said. “If your boss wants to talk to me, he can come down here himself.”

“Mr. Rackham is busy,” Older Guy said. Lizard-eyes, meanwhile, was sidling to Vane’s left. He twitched the shotgun in his direction, and the man stopped moving.

“Let’s stop pretending Rackham is the one in charge,” Vane suggested to the older guy. “We both know he’s just a pawn in this game. So, I repeat, if your boss wants to negotiate his terms with me, he can come and get me himself.”

Older Guy sucked his teeth and smirked. “Not going to happen, Mr. Vane. I suggest you think over what I’ve said. If you don’t sign the papers when we return tonight, you’re going to wish you’d negotiated with us when you had the opportunity.”

With that, he and Lizard-eyes gave him their backs, a clear indication that they didn’t think he was a real threat, got into the Town Car, and backed out of the alley.

He waited a half-minute to be sure the two guns weren’t coming back and then went inside to find that Kip had already cleaned up his mess and gone back to preparing the cabbage slaw they were offering as a side with the day’s lunch menu.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

Kip didn’t even look up from his precision chopping, merely nodded jerkily and kept going.

“I’d understand if you wanted to take the rest of the day or maybe a few days?”

Kip shook his head and expertly slid the cabbage and onions into the mixing bowl with the flat of the knife.

“Okay,” Vane said. “Good talk.”

When he walked out to stow the shotgun in its usual place, intending to get his .38 from his desk drawer instead, he wasn’t entirely surprised to see a familiar, broad-shouldered figure lurking at what was apparently becoming “his” table in the back corner of the café.

Vane didn’t join Flint at the table but stood, looming, using his height and proximity to send a clear message along with his words.

“You get all that?”

Flint nodded.

“My crew cannot be jeopardized,” Vane said, keeping his volume low but investing his tone with a lethal threat.

“It won’t come to that,” Flint assured him, looking up from stirring sugar into his coffee to meet Vane’s eyes. “I told you, I can keep them out of it.”

“They’re coming back at closing, and they specifically threatened my people.”

Flint shrugged. “That’s their raison d’être. I’d hardly expect anything else from them.”

“What are you planning to do about them?”

“I’ll handle it,” Flint said, putting his hands up in a pushing motion, as if suggesting that Vane needed to calm down.

“How?” Vane asked through clenched teeth. He realized he was clenching his fists, too, when he felt his blunt nails pressing into the skin of his palms.

Flint gave him an appraising look. “Sit down.” It wasn’t couched as a suggestion, and Vane didn’t take orders from anyone, so he stayed on his feet.

Sighing, Flint said, “Fine. Look, you’re just going to have to trust me to do my job. Those two won’t get anywhere near your people tonight. I’m not going to hang you out to dry. In the meantime, relax. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Vane had heard those same words from people who had thought they’d had everything under control until chaos had rolled them over and taken them under, never to be seen again. He wasn’t going to let his crew be victims of Flint’s pride.

“Tell me what the plan is, or I’m going to Rackham right now and take care of this problem my own way.”

It wasn’t an idle threat, and Flint apparently saw the resolve in Vane’s face because he sighed again, as if Vane were being a recalcitrant child, and said, “Please, will you sit down?” in a far more conciliating tone than Vane had yet heard.

Vane moved the chair next to Flint away from the wall and turned it toward the front door with his booted foot and then sat in it, giving Flint his profile, keeping his eyes on the front of the store and on Meeks and Billy, who were behind the counter working on a big takeout order.

“I’ll be watching for our friends to come back,” Flint said. “And when I see them, I’ll dissuade them from lingering. There may be some noise. Nothing for you to worry about. Just keep clear of the service lane after, say, eight o’clock.”

“And if they come in the front instead?”

Flint smiled, all shark’s teeth and ill intent. “Then I trust you can hold them off until I arrive on scene. The whole point is to make it clear you’ve got some back-up of your own without tipping them off that I’m a cop.”

“Shouldn’t you have a team with you to make sure things don’t go sideways?”

Flint shook his head. “A team’s too flashy. I’m here to ensure that the flunkies the boss sends out find you too difficult a mark to take down on their own. We want to draw out the boss, or at least land ourselves a big enough fish to lead us to the boss.”

“You’re asking me to trust you,” Vane noted, as if Flint had made an indelicate request.

Flint said, “You can take care of yourself,” which wasn’t an answer, Vane noticed.

“I’m sending the crew home at eight,” he decided.

Flint shrugged. “That’s your call.”

They didn’t get much custom in the last hour of the night, anyway, only the die-hard insomniacs for whom caffeine held no fear, over-caffeinated college-age philosophers, and frantic novelists holding down a table here or there. He could care for their limited needs on his own.

“Fine.” Vane said, standing. He was dissatisfied and frustrated, irritation crawling beneath his skin, making him want to strike out, do something to release the tension Flint’s nonchalance had engendered in him.

Instead, he walked back behind the counter to see if Billy or Meeks needed help, and when he chanced a look at Flint’s table, the man was gone.

It seemed to take forever for eight o’clock to roll around, so he could send Jenks and Slade, the night crew, home. They’d gone without protest, happy to have a paid hour off, only Jenks saying, “You sure?” as she made for the door.

“Go,” he said. “It’s dead here anyway.”

And it was. Fortunately, there were only two diehard customers occupying their usual seats—one at the counter along the front window and the other at a two-top high table on the far wall. One needed an occasional refill, but the other was so deep in her dissertation revisions that Vane didn’t bother her even to ask.

When he said, “Last call,” at 8:50, they both rose and gathered their things and left, the grad student giving him a distracted wave as she texted with one hand and hiked her laptop bag over her shoulder with the other.

Since he’d already cleaned the machines and done a final wipe-down of the kitchen, there was little for him to do.

He locked up, cashed out the register and locked the money in the floor safe in the office, and retrieved his .38 from the locked drawer in his desk before moving through the darkened kitchen toward the back door, checking that it was locked and barred.

Then he went back through the store, took a moment to scan the street outside the café, and exited, locking the front door behind him.

The street was well-lit and still had traffic this time of night—students heading to the all-night diner two streets down; a thin trickle of patrons from the bars up and down the street; even a pedestrian or two out walking their dogs, noses buried in their cellphones.

No one seemed to notice him as he moved swiftly down the length of his building and ducked into the space between it and the next one down. It was dark in the narrow, fetid alley, but Vane had done reconnaissance in the last light of the waning day and cleared it of any debris he might trip over or kick, signaling his presence.

There was a plastic recycling bin at the far end of the alley, where it came out on the service lane behind the café.

Using it as cover, Vane peered around the corner of the building.

Flint had said he’d take care of the two men who were leaning casually against the hood and trunk of the Town Car, looking for all the world as if threatening innocent businessmen was the order of the evening.

He’d expected Flint’s “noise” to come earlier, but maybe the cop hadn’t wanted to alarm Vane’s few customers.

Or maybe Flint had hung him out to dry.

Acknowledging that he had a choice here—he could walk away; the men hadn’t seen him, after all—Vane considered the likelihood that his café would survive the two men’s disappointment upon discovering that he’d gotten away from them.

It didn’t take much thought: Vane wasn’t the sort to let things go, not when it involved what belonged to him. He’d already lost the only thing he’d ever treasured. He wasn’t going to risk the loss of the acceptable substitute he’d built for himself here.

So, using the bin as cover, he rested his arm across its lid, barrel of the .38 steady on the nearest of the two, Lizard-Eyes, who was leaning on the trunk of the Town Car with his ankles and arms crossed, the picture of ease.

The distinctive snick of Vane cocking the hammer of the .38 shattered that ease. Lizard-eyes was on his feet, gun drawn, in an instant, sharp eyes peering through the dim light of the service lane toward the dark corner where Vane was hiding.

“Move along,” he called out. “Or you’ll never move again.” 

Lizard-Eyes fired in his direction, and then Older Guy was shouting at the younger man, hand on his wrist, making him lower his weapon.

“Are you crazy? There are people out here! Get in the car.”

Older Guy didn’t wait to hear Lizard-Eyes’ response; his door was closed and the engine turning over before the younger man even got all the way into the passenger seat. Then they were peeling out of the service lane, the squeal of their tires echoed by the thin wail of a police siren in the near distance.

Vane cursed and jogged back to the front door of the café, letting himself in even as he de-cocked the gun and put on the safety before hurrying to his office to lock it in his desk once more.

The truncated blurt of a cop car told him the police had arrived out front, but Vane stayed where he was, office door open only a crack, no lights on behind him to betray his presence.

There was the rapping of knuckles on the frame of the front door and then, a few moments later, the same sound was repeated against the dinged-up metal of the rear door.

Vane wondered how long he was going to have to wait in the dark, if the cops were going to search out evidence of a gunshot or would chalk it up to a backfire or an overly nervous neighbor.

The third rap, this time against the glass of the front door, came a few minutes into the tense silence of waiting.

Vane couldn’t see the front of the café from his office, and he was loath to reveal his presence in case it was the cops, but he had a feeling he knew who was there, his instincts proving right when he slid along the wall leading to the counter area and looked around to see a familiar, broad-shouldered silhouette standing at the front door.

Flint wasn’t back-lit by strobing blue-and-reds, so Vane crossed the floor of the café and let him in, taking care to lock up behind him and move them both away from the plate glass that took up most of the café-front.

Flint’s jaw was tight with some suppressed emotion, and when they got to the hall in the back, he immediately crowded into Vane’s space.

But Vane was tired of being pushed around, so he shoved back.

Flint struck the closed door of Vane’s office with a bang loud enough to alert any prowling cops that someone was, indeed, inside.

Undeterred, Flint rebounded and came right back at Vane, straight-arming him into the wall opposite the office, which he struck with another resounding bang.

Flint’s forearm was across Vane’s collarbones, pinning him, his knee shoved between Vane’s thighs, pressing, just on the point of pain, against his balls.

“I told you to stay out of the alley,” Flint growled, pressing his whole weight against Vane, who was trapped and wild with it.

“Get. Off. Me,” Vane said, his voice low and controlled, a vicious, subsonic hum filling him up inside. He wanted to beat Flint bloody and then fuck him face down on the floor. He surged against Flint’s weight, and Flint’s arm slid up scant inches to press against his throat.

Vane growled and thrashed, Flint’s knee pinching his balls and putting uncomfortable pressure against his cock, which was somehow half-hard and filling.

“Get. Off!” he gasped, feeling the edges of his world crumbling inward, gray consuming his vision like film on fire.

Then Flint leaned in and bit Vane’s lower lip, hard, and pulled, and as if a switch had been flipped, Vane slumped, heat suffusing his belly, limbs weak with a sudden, intense urge he couldn’t name.

“Good boy,” Flint murmured, his breath on Vane’s face making him sweat.

Flint’s arm eased away from Vane’s throat, sliding back down to brace him against the wall as he took his knee out from between Vane’s thighs and slipped his free hand between them instead.

Vane had only a moment’s blinding anticipation before Flint’s hand was around his cock, stripping him in short, rough jerks, movement hampered by Vane’s jeans and the awkward angle.

It didn’t matter; the touch alone had begun the shuddering that erupted out of Vane, who hissed between his clenched teeth, refusing to cry out as orgasm broke him open, spilling hot across Flint’s wrist.

“Christ,” Flint gritted, releasing Vane to reach for his own fly.

Vane swatted his hand clear, and though his own hands were shaking and his vision still wobbly, he got his hand around Flint’s cock, which was heavy and thick, hard and weeping from the slit.

“Close,” Flint muttered, and Vane set a punishing rhythm, hissing, “Fucking come, you cocksucking motherfucker.”

Flint choked on a groan and did as he was told, droplets of spend glinting in the hair of Vane’s forearm like seed pearls when he let go and pulled away, so Flint could straighten up and pivot around to put his shoulders to the wall beside Vane’s.

They stood there for long minutes, blowing like panicked horses, Vane admiring the broad bellows of Flint’s chest as he took deep breaths and tried to bring down his heartrate.

Then he tore his eyes away, needing to regulate more than just his breath. Head against the wall, eyes on the ceiling, Vane said, “That was…”

He didn’t have a word for it, only several—violent, brilliant, hot as fuck, terrifying, exhilarating.

A terrible mistake.

“It was,” Flint agreed, just as if Vane had finished his first thought and not had the second one at all.

The cop sounded mellower, his voice low, words a little blurry. Vane swiveled his head to take in Flint’s profile.

Fucked-out, post-coital bliss looked good on him, goddamn the man. 

“This didn’t solve anything,” Vane observed once he thought he could speak without panting.

Flint grunted noncommittally and straightened away from the wall to sort himself out.

Vane walked over to the storeroom without bothering to do up his fly and brought back two clean towels, handing one to Flint, whose eyes were unabashedly fixed to the sharp cut of Vane’s pelvis where it was revealed by his low-slung, open jeans.

Vane smirked, smug as a cat with canary in its teeth, and Flint reclaimed his gaze.

They cleaned up and set themselves to rights in silence that grew denser the longer it went on.

“Drink?” Vane said, desperate to break the tension and wanting something to do with his hands that didn’t involve getting them down Flint’s pants again.

“Thanks,” Flint agreed.

The office was too small for the two of them if Vane wanted to keep his hands to himself, so he indicated their usual table; it was far enough back in the dark interior of the café that they could probably avoid being seen from the street. While Flint sat, he retrieved a bottle of El Dorado 12 Year from his office and two glasses from the kitchen.

When he put the bottle on the table, Flint raised an eyebrow: “A little on-brand, don’t you think?”

Vane snorted. “I won’t apologize for my tastes.”

“Or your taste,” Flint murmured, pouring them each a round.

“You wouldn’t know,” Vane pointed out, and Flint tipped his glass as if to say, _Touché_.

“Next time,” Flint promised, his lips obscenely red around the edge of the glass as he took another sip. Vane watched the progress of the liquid, that powerful throat swallowing.

He swallowed himself, a sympathetic reaction, and turned his eyes to his glass, deciding there’d been quite enough distraction for one night. 

It was time to get to the point.

“You weren’t there,” Vane said. 

“I was. I was waiting for the café to go dark. So were they. You didn’t give me time to put my plan into play.”

“Maybe if you’d shared it with me—”

“Or if you’d just done as I asked you to,” Flint finished for him, fixing him with a hard look. “Whatever you used to be, you’re a regular citizen now. You can’t go inviting firefights in alleyways. We aren’t on the high seas.”

“I’m not your underling,” Vane said, feeling a different kind of heat stirring in his gut. 

“You’re a civilian,” Flint emphasized, putting his empty glass down with a hard rap. “Besides, the point of tonight’s failed exercise was for Rackham to discover that you’ve got your own crew to back your play.”

Vane concentrated on his glass, which he was spinning in slow circles on the table. His teeth were clenched so tightly that his jaw ached, and he wanted to come up out of his seat like a geyser and lay Flint out on the floor.

The image had some appeal.

Vane took in a breath and then another, ignoring the big man taking up all the air in the space next to him.

“You’re asking me to trust that you can keep me safe,” Vane observed, his voice that deceptive quiet it got just before he unleased violence. That particular tone was still legendary in bayside bars across swaths of the Caribbean and in a few dens of iniquity on the coast of West Africa.

“I am,” Flint agreed. “And I can.”

“Why should I believe you?” Vane met Flint’s eyes and held them, waiting, breath easing out of him in a silent, slow stream. He was ready for whatever came next, the soles of his feet actually prickly with the need to move, to do…something.

Flint’s smile turned suggestive. “I think I’ve given you some reason.”

Vane barked a laugh, short and ugly. “Please, Flint. I’m easy, not cheap. You think you can buy my trust for a handjob in the back hall?”

If he hadn’t been looking at Flint so intently, he might have missed the brief flare of something that seemed like hurt that flashed in his eyes and then was replaced, almost at once, by his usual cool regard.

“What do you want?” Flint asked, laying one hand flat on the table and then turning it over, as if to show he had nothing in it.

“I want to know why you’re so hot for the big boss. You’re too much of an animal to want a desk job, so you’re not bucking for promotion. You didn’t know me before you started stalking my café. And I can’t believe you give a fuck about the availability of passable sandwiches and damned fine coffee on this stretch of Arbiter Street. So, what is it that’s driving you?”

“Maybe I like the pastries here.”

“They’re baked at Rackham’s,” Vane noted.

Flint shrugged and turned both hands palms-up on the table, as if to say, _Can’t blame a guy for trying._

Vane wasn’t going to be charmed—or fucked—out of an answer this time, though, and after a long, tense moment, Flint seemed to recognize that.

With a sigh, he threw himself back in his chair and ran a hand over his face. Maybe it was the shadow playing keep-away in that corner of the darkened café, or maybe it was the sudden slump of those great shoulders, but Vane thought Flint looked tired and old.

He almost regretted pushing Flint, until Flint’s whiskey-over-gravel voice began to speak.

He wasn’t looking at Vane; his eyes were fixed on some vision from the far distant past, a place neither of them could ever return and only one of them had ever been.

Vane had his own places like that, pitfalls in his memory into which he’d plummet, emerging some eons later feeling like planetary gravity had shifted in the time he’d been away.

“I’ve been with the SCI for fifteen years. Before that, I was in the navy, a Commander on a fleet destroyer in the Gulf of Aden.”

Vane felt cold wash through his belly and had to ruthlessly stifle the urge to get up and walk away from the table and the café and the city and his life here.

What were the chances?  
  
He swallowed every urge to flee and watched the movement of Flint’s expressions as they crossed his shadowed face.

“This was before DADT was repealed. I was seeing Thomas, a civilian who oversaw an NGO in Yemen. The country was a terrible mess—not worse than it is now, but still… Thomas was determined to make it better, or at least save as many lives as he could. It was dangerous work, but he never minded, and I couldn’t very well protest about life in the line of fire.”

Flint swallowed visibly, and Vane felt a sympathetic tightness in his own throat.

“Someone—an intelligence operative who wanted Thomas to use his organization to move weapons secretly—used our relationship as a lever to get him to do it. He didn’t tell me, of course. He didn’t want to ‘compromise’ me, I’m sure. He was protecting me—I’d have been court-martialed and dismissed if it came out that we were…”

Flint dismissed what he and Thomas were with a wave of his hand, as if to suggest that it didn’t matter. But Vane could see even in the dim light filtering through from the front windows that it mattered so much to Flint that it drove him beyond words, even now, all these years later.

“He died. The caravan moving medical supplies was attacked for the weapons, and he and three others in his organization were killed, their bodies hacked to pieces on video to be posted later as a warning to other ‘infidels’ who would interfere with the great cause of freedom in Yemen.”

Flint fell silent for long enough that Vane wondered if he’d run out of words.

Then, with a great, shuddering inrush of breath, Flint continued. “That intelligence agent lost his position in his agency for what happened—Thomas’ father had influence, he was in the Foreign Service—and after he got shot working as a ‘private contractor’ in the Arabian Peninsula, he returned to the States.

I lost track of him for years, though I kept looking for him. I wanted him to pay for what he’d done to Thomas.

Last year, I heard a rumor—a breath of a whisper, nothing else—and the description sounded like this man.

I still have no actionable evidence. But I feel it in my bones: It’s him. It’s the man who got Thomas killed.”

This time, when Flint stopped talking, Vane knew he was finished. His hands were spread palms-down on the table, as if he were bracing himself through a bout of vertigo, and his eyes were fixed on the darkness pooled between them.

Vane didn’t know what to say. He’d never been in the kind of love Flint was describing—for a long time, his life had been too full, too wild for any one person to hold his interest for long. 

And for a long time after that, he’d been too dead inside, a waterlogged, sodden excuse for existence, so that he could only ever consider each day as it dawned.

Any more than that, and he’d remember, and in remembering, drown.

He was feeling now, though, something immediate and enormous, and he was holding it off with gritted teeth, a fierce, rictus grin of denial.

He shook his head, swallowed the bitterness back down into his throat, and said, “I’m sorry. Your Thomas sounds like he was a good man.”

It was too little, wholly inadequate to the truth that had been spilled between them.

But Flint nodded woodenly and then seemed to recall himself to their place and time and to the circumstance of his confession.

He looked at Vane, his eyes wet with a shining fury. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to do this anymore.”

By ‘this’, Vane knew he meant the mission against Rackham’s handlers. But he also thought that Flint might mean more, too. Hope, the vicious bitch, clenched her hand around his heart and squeezed.

“Shut the fuck up,” Vane answered concisely. “Of course, we’re doing this. Haven’t I been saying so all along?”

That eked a weak laugh out of Flint, who stood wearily from the table, still bowed like an old man, like the weight of his memories was too much to bear.

“I’m sorry,” Vane said again, standing also and putting a hand on Flint’s shoulder.

With an aborted sound, Flint reeled him into a rib-crushing embrace, his five o-clock shadow abrading Vane’s jaw, his breath bursting hot across the thin skin behind Vane’s ear.

Vane sucked in a breath and held Flint right back, giving him what he needed until, at last, Flint released him, clearing his throat, saying, “I’ll follow you home to make sure you’re safe.”

Vane smiled, “I have a room upstairs, actually. For…emergencies.”

Flint shifted his weight, his expression suddenly uncertain, stripping the years away, making him appear young and untried.

“To rest,” Vane said, in as gentle a voice as he was capable of offering. “Just rest.”

Flint nodded, tight-jawed, and said, “Okay,” gruff and uneasy, so Vane wasted no time leading him out the front—after a careful scan of the street—and around the side, where a separate security entrance led to a narrow stairwell at the top of the first flight of which was a hallway lined to either side with avocado green doors, two on each side.

He turned to the right and stopped at the door on the left, unlocking and opening it to usher Flint into a neat, small living area with a sofa and an easy chair, a cobbler’s bench coffee table, a standing lamp, and a bookshelf lined with paperbacks.

Beyond the living room was a galley kitchen on the right and a tiny bathroom with shower stall on the left and a bedroom further back, long and narrow, with a double bed, nightstand, and wardrobe.

There were no personal touches in the entire place, even the books in the living room the popular novels of the sort sold in airports, nothing that might betray Vane’s own tastes.

“The couch pulls out,” he said as he watched Flint’s keen eyes surveying the little apartment.

“No need,” Flint murmured, stepping into Vane’s space.

He expected to be shoved around, manhandled into the bedroom or up against the hallway wall. 

He expected to have to assert his authority as host to tell Flint to back off.

He did not expect Flint to cup his face in those big, rough hands and pull him in for a sweet, warm, close-mouthed kiss.

“Thank you,” Flint said against his lips, and then moved past him into the bedroom, where he toed out of his boots and efficiently removed his holster, laying his gun on the bedside table, before stripping out of his shirt, khakis, and socks, all of which he folded and left neatly piled in the empty bottom of the mostly empty wardrobe.

This left Flint in boxer briefs that emphasized his muscular thighs and the fact that despite what he’d said about resting, at least part of Flint was interested in more than innocent kisses.

Vane swallowed a curse and tried to tell himself that this was all foolishness, that he should rescind his offer, rude as that would be, or wait until Flint was asleep to leave him there, to return to his actual apartment alone, where he could sleep unmolested by the desires even now undoing his resolve.

“Come to bed,” Flint suggested; he’d already climbed beneath the covers and closed his eyes, removing some but not all of Vane’s temptation by hiding that magnificent body away.

Vane swallowed again, once more resisting an unmanly urge to flee, and reminded himself that this had been his idea, after all. Sighing, he turned away from the bed, intending to use the bathroom before returning, when Flint said, “Running away?”

Vane’s only response was a manual one, but Flint must have opened his eyes, for his rich, low chuckle followed Vane down the short hall and raised goosebumps down his back as if a hand had caressed his spine.

Once done with his brief ablutions, Vane returned to the bedroom and made quick work of his own boots and clothes, stowing them neatly beside Flint’s in the bottom of the wardrobe before climbing in next to him.

The double wasn’t really big enough for two, a fact Vane had never had occasion to discover, and certainly put two broad-shouldered men rather closer together than he’d have liked.

Flint was laying on the door side of the bed, on his side facing it, one hand beneath his pillow and, probably not coincidentally, within easy reach of his gun. Even with inches between them, he could feel the heat coming from the other man, and the tug of gravity toward his side reminded Vane unsettlingly of sleeping in his berth aboard the _Nassau_. She’d had a habit of carrying her weight more to starboard than to port, a mysterious flaw Vane had never been able to resolve.

He didn’t want to resist the pull of gravity nor the promising heat of Flint’s broad back, but he forced himself to lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, hands clenched against the urge to reach out and touch Flint.

“Go to sleep,” Flint rumbled.

Vane nearly whimpered at the way that low growl made heat bloom in his belly.

“Shut up,” Vane suggested amiably.

Flint’s laugh was knowing and wicked, and Vane almost abandoned the bed, charge of cowardice be damned.

Then Flint rolled onto his back and reached for Vane’s hand beneath the covers, squeezing once before saying, “Later,” with such rich promise that Vane felt something settle in him that let him, at last, close his eyes.

He listened until Flint’s breathing slowed and then, to the gentle susurrus of the other man’s sleeping breath, Vane fell asleep himself.

An immense crash woke him minutes or hours later: It was still dark outside, the streetlights fighting back the inky shadows, creating deeper pools of night on the sidewalk in between their saving halos.

Vane was out of bed in an instant, Flint up on one elbow, gun already drawn.

He slipped into his jeans, not bothering with shoes and shirt, throwing, “It came from the café,” over his shoulder before racing out of his apartment, chased by Flint’s vociferous cursing.

Regretting his haste when the cold filth of the alley ground into his bare feet, Vane swore and pushed on, around to the front of the café, where he saw flames through the gaping hole where the floor-to-ceiling window to the left of the door used to be. 

Ignoring the glass shards slicing up his soles, Vane unlocked and opened the front door to see that a burning tire had been thrown through the window and had rolled, taking out tables like a bowling ball until coming to rest just in front of the counter, where it was already licking at the remains of a table, growing greedily. 

“Fuck!” he shouted, hurrying to the kitchen for a fire extinguisher, purpose thwarted by his own blood, making the floor slippery with every step.

He was returning to the café proper, extinguisher in hand, when the rapid patter of automatic gunfire from the street out front froze him in place, and he had to quash the urge to make sure Flint was safe, instead hurrying back to the site of the fire to douse it. It felt like it took an eternity for the flames to finally be smothered, the last red ember blinking out, but it was probably only minutes.

The gunfire had become more deliberate, the shots spaced farther apart, like someone was aiming at a particular target with purpose, and Vane hurried toward the counter to retrieve the sawed-off.

He didn’t make it. An enormous pressure on the back of his skull, a flash of blinding pain, and Vane was falling, trying to cry out even as darkness consumed him and he was gone.

*****

Vane was plunged into deep water, a dark, cold ocean slicing his breath to shreds. He shivered, clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering, and tried to hold his breath. 

If he opened his mouth, he’d drown.

He broke the surface thrashing, arms pinioned, legs heavy, body wracked with shivers.

His head spun dizzily, his stomach roiling, and he heaved sideways, retching strings of yellow bile onto the floor.

Floor?

Vane’s head was a mess of ringing pain, and he couldn’t seem to open his eyes all the way without what scant light there was ratcheting up the agony.

Still, he made out that he was sitting down, his arms and ankles bound to the cold metal of a chair.

He was freezing because the room was unfinished and, judging by the view, at least twenty stories up. It was a corner space, two walls gone, only two-by-fours hammered as de facto railings to break the fall of someone foolish enough to venture near the edge.

The other two walls were unfinished drywall. Wires like spiders’ legs spewed from holes on the walls and overhead.

Beneath his feet, plastic crinkled, the heavy, clear stuff used by painters to protect the floor.

It was spring, the air damp and cool, tolerable at ground level, where the buildings blocked the breeze. At that height, though, a constant wind caught the edges of the plastic sheeting and made it bubble, as if there were invisible creatures moving beneath it toward his bare feet.

Shirtless, with only his jeans to protect him, Vane was freezing, the muscles of his jaws already aching from the way he had to clamp them shut to keep his teeth from chattering.

There was a steady thrum of aching muscles in his neck and shoulders from the way he was clenching his muscles to keep from shivering.

Vane knew from long experience at sea how easily a man could die in fifty-degree water. He was sure the rules of hypothermia were the same on land as in the water.

If he didn’t get warm soon, it wouldn’t matter what his captors wanted from him.

He heard the industrial grind of a construction elevator long before footsteps heralded the arrival of two people—Jack Rackham and the goon who drove one of his bakery trucks, the one Vane had punched in the ear.

The goon was looking less green-gilled and dizzy than he had been the last time Vane had seen him, though he couldn’t help but notice the guy’s ear was swollen and angry-looking. It probably didn’t prepossess the guy to have warm feelings for Vane, which was doubtless why Rackham had brought him along for the next portion of the evening’s entertainment.

“You should’ve taken me up on my gracious offer,” Rackham said, stopping in front of Vane well out of splatter distance.

Big-Ear was out of sight behind Vane, and he’d be damned before he craned his neck around to see where the guy was. His head hurt abominably, for one thing, but for another, he could hear the guy’s adenoidal wheeze just fine.

Rackham was fiddling with his phone as if he were getting text messages from a sweetheart, but when he raised it, the telltale red eye gave Vane a preview of what was to come.

“I need you to scream for me, Vane. Think you can do that?”

Before he could marshal a witty reply, a fist struck him in the ear.

Fire exploded across the side of his head, and he dry-heaved as his body protested the additional abuse.

He sucked in a desperate breath, tears spilling down his cheeks scalding his frozen skin.

The pain made him breathless, and for that he was grateful, because it meant he couldn’t scream.

Big-Ear set about a systematic beating then, of the sort that Vane had witnessed only three or four times in his life, usually when someone on a crew had betrayed his own and was being taught the consequences of his folly.

A blow to his solar plexus doubled him over, and he panicked, unable to suck in air.

Big-Ear took advantage of his posture to drive a fist into his back, below the shoulder-blades, and though it hurt like a son of a bitch, at least the guy couldn’t reach his kidneys.

A fist in his hair yanked his head back, exposing his throat, which the thug ignored—probably had orders not to kill him just yet—in favor of short, hard jabs to his gut, which forced yet more yellow bile out of him and set the room to spinning crazily around him.

The vertigo made him retch until his ribs popped, and he was a wheezing, snotty, crying mess when Rackham said, “That’s a wrap,” and walked by him, the big guy slapping him once, twice, open-handed, blows that split his cheek on the left and eyebrow on the right before a barked order from behind him sent him lumbering away.

Vane heard the elevator engage and tried to breathe out a sigh of relief, only to catch his breath on the loose shards of glass floating in his chest.

He coughed, which wrung a moan out of him, and watched with a distant indifference as bloody spittle spattered his wet jeans.

Cold might be the thing that killed him, he thought muzzily, but internal bleeding was probably going to give it a run for its money.

At least he was in too much pain to notice the shivering now.

*****

Vane was tired of drowning.

This time, cold waves slapped at his face, making him splutter. He was heavy, weighed down by something, and he knew that soon his exhaustion would drag him under for good.

The very solid smack that followed the wave of cold water brought him more fully to himself, and he almost wished he’d really been drowning. His whole body ached, his vision was gray at the edges from the repeated trauma to his head, and he was at that point of cold when pain set in, his skin feeling like it was slowly icing over, his muscles locked in rigor trying to fight the convulsive response.

“You won’t last long,” a voice said, and Vane focused on the man standing before him beside an empty bucket of water.

The scuffing of a shoe against plastic told Vane there was at least one other person in the room, likely the underling who’d carried the bucket up in the elevator.

The guy in the suit sneering at him didn’t seem the sort to want to get his manicured hands wet.

He was middle height, maybe a few inches shorter than Flint, stocky running to fat, like a hyper-fit guy who’d let himself get comfortable. His suit was the sort you didn’t buy off the rack and his brown hair was cut with a precision that suggested he spent money on a stylist.

He was wearing a Rolex, pearl cufflinks, and too much cologne.

When he smiled, it didn’t reach his predator’s eyes. Vane had had occasion to be on the other side of that hungry look before, and it didn’t bother him, a feeling he let show in his expression.

Suit Guy scoffed. “You’ll have a different reaction when loverboy shows up.”

Cold of a different sort suffused his stomach, and Vane swallowed, his throat painfully tight around the sudden fear. He didn’t care so much what happened to him, but he didn’t want to watch Flint die, and he certainly didn’t desire to be the cause of his death.

A shudder clutched him then, rattling his teeth in his aching head and making his muscles contract. He bit back an involuntary sound, and the man tsked as though Vane were making a spectacle of himself.

“Don’t worry—you’ll be warm soon enough. I assume you’ll be going to hell, given your history, all those poor, drowned souls you’re responsible for killing.”

Vane’s blood went colder still, and he couldn’t keep the shock off his face.

Suit Guy sneered. “Oh, yes, I know exactly who you are, Captain Vane, and soon, so will Captain Flint, unless I’m mistaken about who that is coming to join us.”

Over the pounding of blood in his ears, Vane made out the sound of the elevator once again making the long climb to his prison.

Pain clutched at his chest as familiar, booted steps approached.

“James, so good to see you again,” Suit Guy said.

“Rogers,” came Flint’s answer from behind Vane. 

The growl was welcome, even if the man was not, and Vane closed his eyes against a rush of relief that at least he wasn’t alone. It was a selfish thought, but he couldn’t seem to help it. Every breath in his chest caught on something jagged, and he knew from the shortness of those breaths that something important was broken.

“You can let Vane go now. He’s not a part of this.”

“Ah, but he’s your lover, isn’t he?” Rogers answered, his tone light, as if they were two men talking over coffees.

Flint said nothing, but he must have showed his answer on his face, for Rogers’ next words were thick with gloating.

“At first, I didn’t believe it when my man reported what he’d found, the two of you canoodling over coffee in the dark.” 

He made that disappointed tsking sound again. “I’m surprised at you, James. Vane is quite a comedown from Saint Thomas. Are you slumming? Is he a dirty fuck, I wonder?”

Flint took a step closer, and Vane distracted himself by imagining that he could feel his body heat across his back. He wanted desperately to close his eyes and let that phantom warmth lull him to sleep, but there was something he had to pay attention to, wasn’t there?

It was hard to think.

“Thomas’ death was professional, you know, nothing personal. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. If I happened to profit from his death, well…”

Vane heard Flint’s quick intake of breath and tried to understand what it meant, but lethargy was overcoming him, everything slowing down, water rising in his ears to drown out the noise around him.

He struggled upright in his chair, moaning when the motion ground together something in his chest, but the sharp stab of pain cleared his head a little, enough to say, “Flint.”

“It’s alright, Charles. I’ll take you home soon.”

Rogers made a delighted sound. “All this time, and you still wear your heart on your sleeve where anyone can stab it. Honestly, it’s admirable. Which is why I’m going to do you a favor tonight. I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t care what happens to this pirate. He’s not worthy to lick your boots, Flint. He’s certainly no Saint Thomas.”

“Stop saying his name,” Flint growled, which got only another laugh out of Rogers.

“Yes, alright. Let’s talk about Vane, shall we? About how he came to be in this city, so far away from his beloved sea. Did you know he lost his smuggling ship, the _Nassau_? Went down with all souls aboard—all except Captain Vane here. I thought captains were always supposed to go down with their ships, eh?”

The last was directed at Vane, who was staring at Rogers expressionlessly, the horror of what was about to transpire having driven out the last of his will to fight. 

“Would you like to tell him the story, or shall I?”

Vane shook his head a fraction of an inch, tongue-tied and breathless, the cold making his ribs creak with the effort of breathing. 

He wanted to tell Flint not to listen, that it wasn’t true, what he was about to hear. He wanted to say he was sorry for it all, for the lies he’d told and the ones he hadn’t, for Flint being there now to save him when Vane wasn’t the sort who deserved salvation.

But he couldn’t speak, couldn’t make the maelstrom in his head quiet enough to form words that would make sense.

“Vane was a smuggler, as I’m sure you know—mostly in the Gulfs of Aden and Guinea. Rough crowd on both sides of the Horn, but the Captain here fit right in. He’d carry anything, even people, and he didn’t scruple to look too closely at the papers of the ones who asked for passage. The Nassau was perfect for it—plenty of smugglers’ hides. And he was good, no doubt about it—never got caught with anything illegal. In fact, I think he was stopped by your boys once or twice. That right, Vane?”

Vane didn’t answer.

“Anyway, he’d carry anyone for the right price, and that included refugees running from the clusterfuck of their home countries. Like Yemen, for example. He took aboard three extended Yemeni families desperate to get to Sudan—talk about frying pan to fire. There were thirty-eight souls, altogether, including six children, I’m told. The littlest a girl of three—Muriel was her name, wasn’t it? Sweet little Muriel.”

Vane heard himself make a sound like a wounded creature and clamped his teeth together so hard around it that he’d swear his molars cracked. His head was a constant thrumming agony, but the knives in his chest were more urgent, and he gave up the struggle to speak, glad that at least his shivering had ceased.

He knew in what rational part of him was left that that was a bad sign, but Vane was beyond caring about anything but what Flint must be thinking. He wished he could see Flint’s face, wished he could communicate to him not to listen, not to believe what he was about to hear.

“They were almost to the drop-off point when it happened—a pursuit ship appeared on the horizon off the port side. It was miles away but closing fast, and the boat they were to rendezvous with to take the refugees ashore in Port Sudan was nowhere to be seen.

So, what did Captain Courageous here do? Did he order his crew to man the guns and bring up the sonic cannon? Did he stand and fight for the lives of little Muriel and her brother and sister and the other families on board his ship? 

No. Rather than risk his own skin in the battle, Vane threw overboard an inflatable raft and then rigged the _Nassau_ to explode with everyone—including his crew—aboard. 

When the pursuers arrived, they found only Vane, floating in the wreckage of his ship in an emergency dinghy. He told them there’d been a catastrophic gas leak and explosion and that he’d only escaped because he’d been on the conning tower when the tanks blew.

The Yemeni authorities didn’t believe him, but they couldn’t prove that he was lying, either. They were in the Gulf of Aden without authorization, and they didn’t have time to investigate the scene before the Sudanese rescue boat appeared.

The Yemenis took Vane into custody, but because they couldn’t stick around to collect evidence, they could only hold him on suspicion. 

Your boy here is a murderer many times over, as cold-blooded and calculating as they come. I’ll be doing you a favor when I kill him, and I think that more than makes up for the loss of the last one, don’t you?”

Flint’s silence was damning and Rogers’ gleeful laugh not unexpected.

“I’m not interested in the heat killing a cop would bring down on my organization, so I’m going to let you walk out of here lesson learned. You’re free to go, Captain Flint. And as a bonus, I’m going to take out this trash for you, gratis. Call it a token of my regard for your tenacity in pursuing me all these years.”

“Alright,” he heard Flint say, still out of sight behind him. “I’ll leave now. But know this: I will never stop coming for you, Rogers. You’ll never be free of me.”

Rogers laughed again, a sneer in it now. “Aw, that’s sweet. Until we meet again, then?” 

He made a shooing gesture with the gun. 

“I have people to kill, places to be. Busy, busy, busy.”

Vane had known what Flint’s decision would be, but it still drove a spike through his already labored heart, and he coughed, blood foaming from his lips, and then gasped on the inhale.

It was like someone dragged a gaffing hook through his lungs.

“Wait,” he wheezed, barely audible, and he felt the weight of a hand on his shoulder and then the scalding breath across his ice-cold cheek. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, hoping Flint would hear him and know, somehow, that he was apologizing for not telling him the truth before now, for Flint having to hear it from the man who’d killed his Thomas.

Sorry he couldn’t have been more like Thomas, worthy of Flint’s regard.

Sorry they wouldn’t have time to get to know each other better, to find out who each of them truly was.

The hand and the heat disappeared, and he heard Flint walking away, heard the elevator gate open and the motor engage. Heard it descend, carrying Flint out of his life, what little there was left of it.

Rogers wasted no more words on Vane. He took a step back, raised the gun, and moved his finger from the safety position to the trigger. 

Vane jerked in his chair at the first shot, eyes closing involuntarily as he waited for the end.

A thud and a clatter brought his eyes open, and he saw Rogers sprawled face down on the plastic, blood blossom on his back and a pool of red spreading out from beneath his lax body.

He heard only distantly the ascending elevator, his heart slowing in his chest, his breath harder and harder to come by. He was drowning again, this time for real, his lungs filling up with broken glass.

Footsteps approached at a run, but they were too late for him. He was deep in the water now, where he’d always been destined to end up, too far down for anyone to pull him back, and Vane surrendered with only a single regret—that he couldn’t see Flint’s storm-sea eyes one last time.

*****

When Vane broke the surface, it was hours or eons later. The susurrus of rubber soles on linoleum and a chorus of distant beeps told him he was in the hospital even before the vaguely antiseptic smell of missed meals clued him in.

It was dim in his room, and the curtains over the window near his bed closed, but he thought it must be night, though whether it was the same night or a different one, he didn’t know.

He was alone, the only chair in the single room pulled up flush against the wall near the little hallway that led to the bathroom and, beyond that, the corridor, low-lit, only a muted hush to tell him that nurses and aids were nearby.

He took a moment to number his bones before he turned to the internal injuries of an invisible kind: Flint might have saved him in the high-rise, but he wasn’t coming for him again, unless it was to put him behind bars for what he’d done in the Gulf of Aden.

Cold fingers clutched at his heart, and the monitor over his head creeled out a warning. It didn’t matter to Vane if he died; this had been the last life he’d had the will to try, and it had failed spectacularly. He didn’t think he had the energy to move on.

That thought dragged him down into the dark once more, where he dreamt of icy hands around his ankles, tugging him to the slimy bottom, where the dead lived in moaning splendor amidst the wreckage of the _Nassau_.

He woke to the familiar scent of coffee from the Weathervane.

Billy was casting a shadow over his bed from where he broke the sunlight pouring in the partially opened curtains.

“Hey,” Billy said, putting the cup down on the bedtable and rolling it carefully over to Vane, who was trying to sit up without making a mess of his insides.

“Thank you,” Vane said, nodding to the coffee.

Billy shrugged, “It’s the least I could do. I should’ve helped you more that night, but I was awaiting orders, and…”

Vane held up a hand, and Billy stuttered to a halt.

“I think you left out a few parts of that sentence.”

Billy blushed and ducked his head. He was one “Aw, shucks!” away from scuffing his shoe against the floor.

“I’m not a student at the university,” Billy explained. “I’m a sniper. I mean, I used to be, when I was in the Marines. I work on Captain Flint’s team now. He asked me to keep an eye on you four months ago, when I got the job.”

This time, there was a distinct shoe-on-floor noise.

“I’m sorry I lied to you, sir. I didn’t want to, but…” 

Billy shrugged, obviously helpless despite his size and training as a Marine to gainsay the orders of Captain Flint.

“You’re the one who shot Rogers?”

Billy nodded.

“All’s forgiven,” Vane said, smiling wanly and holding out the hand that didn’t have the IV port in it.

Billy shook it solemnly.

“How long have I been in here?” Vane asked, happy to abandon the kid’s perfidy in favor of more immediate concerns.

“Three days. There was internal bleeding, and they had to do surgery when you were brought in. Plus, you were suffering from hypothermia and dehydration and a couple of other things. Docs said it was lucky you were so fit, or you might not have made it.”

Three days.

Vane wondered if Flint had come to visit him at all in that time. He’d be damned to hell before he’d ask, though.

“The insurance adjustor already came by with a quote for the window, and I covered it with plywood, and me and Meeks, Slade, Jenks, and Chelsea cleaned everything up. They’re taking turns covering the café and Kip’s prepping a reduced menu until you’re back on your feet. We told the regulars you’d had a car accident—I hope that’s okay?”

“Billy, you don’t even work for me,” Vane pointed out, humbled by his crew’s loyalty and by the kid’s obvious eagerness to reassure him that things at the Weathervane were okay.

He wanted to feel relief at that, but mostly he felt tired and sad.

He let his eyes close as Billy was telling him something about Mrs. Javits, the knitter who always came in on Tuesdays and Fridays with her little dog, Macon, who wore a perpetually embarrassed expression because of the sweaters she made him wear.

When he woke, it was much later, judging by the dimness beginning to pool at the lower edge of the window. Someone had taken out his catheter, and the fact that he’d slept through it told him more than he wanted to know about his condition.

Naturally, that was a sign that he needed to lever himself out of bed, pull the IV out, take off the fingertip monitor sensor, and make his shaky, cursing way to the bathroom, where he was relieved to find that his urine was clear and not bloody, a sure sign that it was time to go home.

He was already dressed in the clean clothes Billy had left for him on the room’s only chair when a nurse came in to see what all the machine fuss was about and told him to get back into bed, what did he think he was doing?

Since Vane was a fearsome high seas smuggler, he didn’t let himself be cowed into submission, though it was a near thing. Already, he could feel his surgery incisions starting to twinge, and when he breathed too deeply, sharp things shifted in his chest.

Ignoring this and the nurse, he signed himself out AMA and headed at an old man’s pace for the elevator and then to the lobby, where he used his cellphone—also brought by the considerate Billy—to call a cab.

Thirty-five dollars later, he exited the taxi a half-block from the café. He barely made it onto the curb under his own power, but once upright, he managed to shuffle to the corner of the building, where he could peer into the café without being seen.

He stood there lurking, stalking his own crew, and wondered what the legalities were of signing it over to them to be turned into a co-op, where the regulars could buy in and keep the place afloat after he was gone.

He’d have to leave now that it seemed likely he wouldn’t die. He couldn’t tell Flint the truth about what had happened in the Gulf of Aden—it wasn’t his secret to reveal—and Flint wasn’t the kind of man to let it go.

If he dug too deeply, it wasn’t Vane’s life that would be forfeit.

Suddenly weary, fatigue crashing over him in knee-weakening waves, Vane steadied himself against the wall. He didn’t want to stay at the apartment here; it would remind him too much of the last time he’d been there, sharing his bed with Flint. He just had to summon the energy to call a cab and the will to stay awake until it arrived.

A scuff on the pavement warned him he wasn’t alone, and the sixth sense for danger that had stood him in good stead for so many years on the sea told him who he’d see when he turned.

The broad shoulders that seemed capable of carrying the world broke the weak edge of a streetlight’s reach, casting Flint’s face into shadow, but Vane imagined the expression he couldn’t see: Cold, hard, implacable.

He was glad for the shadows that kept him from reading Flint’s disdain.

It was hard enough to hear it in his voice.

“You did me a favor, and I pay my debts, so I’m giving you a day to get out of my state. Change your name, find another profession, go as far under as you can. The day after that, I’m setting the dogs on you.”

Vane pushed away from the wall, felt himself sway, and put a hand flat on the brick wall to hold himself still.

“I need a week,” he countered, when he could say it without sounding winded. Between the fist around his heart and the shards in his lungs, Vane thought he might never take a full breath again.

“You have a day.” 

Vane shook his head and regretted it when a dizzy swooping started to play hell with his balance. 

“I need to see my lawyer, so I can turn the café into a co-op and hand it over to them,” Vane explained. “I’ve also got to contact our vendors to let them know I’ve transferred ownership. Make sure they have everything they need to stay afloat. Then I’ll go.”

Flint may as well have been made of stone. He loomed there, blocking the light, face invisible.

Then, a beloved growl out of the dark: “Tell me the truth.”

Vane didn’t need him to specify which truth: There was only one, the one he couldn’t tell. His throat closed around the desire to speak.

“How can I trust you if you won’t tell me?” Flint asked, and there was desperation there, Vane was sure of it, sure it wasn’t just wishful thinking on his part.

“It’s not my story to tell,” Vane managed, though he felt like he might be dying, his chest filled with glass and his heart turning cold in the fractured cage of his ribs.

Flint took a step out of the obliterating light, and after a moment’s adjustment, Vane could see his face. There was something like hope in his eyes, something grasping, even greedy, in the way his hands were clenched against his thighs, like he wanted to shake the story out of Vane.

Vane swallowed, shivering now, his own body rejecting the thing he’d kept inside for so long.

“Muriel’s father, Abdullah, was a functionary in the Cabinet of Yemen, but his true loyalty was with the Houthis, and when they took Saana in 2014 and the seat of government moved to Aden, Abdullah and some others agreed to continue funneling information to their Houthi friends in Saana. 

When I met Abdullah, he and his and two other families had been hiding in a derelict warehouse in Aden for almost a month. They were days away from being discovered and were desperate for safe passage.

A friend of mine told me of their situation, and I agreed to take them aboard the _Nassau_ and get them to Port Sudan.

Someone must have been tipped off, though, because we hadn’t cleared Mayyun before we spotted a gunboat shadowing us.

The _Nassau_ wasn’t an ordinary fishing boat, though, and we were able to lose them for short stretches, keep ourselves out of sight.

We made the rendezvous point with the gunboat only an hour or so behind us, but the Sudanese relief boat was small and leaky, and there was no way it could outrun the gunboat if they caught up to us.

So, I swore my crew to secrecy and ordered them aboard the Nassau’s lifeboats, which had their own motors, and sent them in the wake of the relief boat, to guard them and make sure they made it to Port Sudan.

And then I blew up my own ship and sent her to the bottom of the Red Sea, and when the Yemenis caught up with me, I told them the story you heard from Rogers.

There wasn’t much of the _Nassau_ left—I’d been thorough in setting the charges. And they couldn’t risk an international incident by waiting around until the US Navy or a Sudanese patrol boat showed up, so they took me into custody and threw me in prison in Aden for being an ‘outside agitator,’ and then our government got me released eight months later.”  
  
Vane shrugged, dismissing the months in prison, the torture and starvation he’d suffered and the disappointment when he was finally released to discover that his crew had split up and moved on to other berths without him.

He didn’t talk about the aimlessness that had taken him from city to city, steadily inland, until the susurrus of the sea haunted him only in nightmares or of the hollowness in his heart where his purpose had once lived, an empty space that had only recently begun to fill itself in.

He waited, numb and shivering, his breath short and sharp in his chest, his eyes on the ground, which was swaying like he was standing on the _Nassau_ ’s deck in a heavy gale.

“Isn’t the captain supposed to go down with his ship?” Flint asked, echoing Rogers, and it should have left Vane bleeding, except for the gentle way Flint said it and the hand beneath his elbow holding him up and then the arms coming around him as he sagged, the mast to which he’d been lashed suddenly gone and no other support to keep him on his feet.

Except for Flint, who murmured, “I’ve got you,” in his ear and wormed a hand into his front pocket to fish out his keys.

The night took on a strobe effect thereafter—

stumbling on the stairs, Flint’s hands hot against his chilled skin.

a flash of light as Flint opened the door and turned on the light to Vane’s apartment above the café.

gravity urging him to his knees and Flint’s voice going low and urgent, words indecipherable.

softness beneath his head.

darkness and a firm hand keeping him from slipping all the way under this time.

He woke once more to darkness and the gentle susurrus of a soft sea, and as he hadn’t in years, he strained to hear channel markers and the slap of waves against anchored hulls and the thousand sounds he’d loved and missed.

Then he remembered he was Charles Vane, captain no more, and the weight of memory might have crushed the breath out of him but for the heavy arm already doing that work.

He felt the strong thighs against the back of his own and the broad chest against his back and the furnace heat of Flint’s body, and he heard, “Go back to sleep,” and he whispered, “Yes, Captain,” and did.

The next time he felt the world turning around him, it was morning, tepid light through the blinds like prison bars on the bare floor beside the bed, and Flint’s breath was a warm reminder of his proximity.

The cock digging into the small of his back was an even warmer reminder, and despite his wounds and the insistent tug of exhaustion and a sense of impending doom that nothing about the confession of the night before had resolved, Vane shifted his weight to give Flint permission to rut against him, and the breath on his neck grew plosive and the muscled arm around his middle drew him—carefully—closer.

“I want you,” Flint said, mouthing along Vane’s jaw until Vane turned into a kiss that was sloppy and heated and made him hard almost at once.

It also twisted his ribcage in a way that made him gasp, and Flint immediately stilled and began to pull away.

Vane trapped Flint’s arm against him, saying, “No, I’m fine. I’m alright.”

“You’re a mess,” Flint countered, but he relaxed and once again snugged himself up against Vane’s back. “And I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Maybe I want you to,” Vane answered.

Flint went still behind him, even his breath no longer breaking against Vane’s bowed neck.

Then, teeth fastened at the join of neck and shoulder and Vane writhed and shouted, pain and pleasure shooting through him, his hips bucking as he moved Flint’s hand towards where it would do more immediate good.

“No,” Flint said, easing from the bite only to drag the rough flat of his tongue over the stinging wound.

Vane choked on a groan and ground back against Flint. His insides were knives and fire, but he was ignoring their warning in favor of chasing the pleasure of that heavy cock sliding in the crease of his ass through his briefs.

Flint sucked on his earlobe and slid his hand beneath the waistband of Vane’s briefs, shoving them under his balls, so he could stroke him in long, tight pulls that had Vane panting and cursing, wanting to come and wanting to hold out until Flint could fuck him, caught on the horns of a pleasurable dilemma.

Flint chuckled wickedly, and the reverberation through Vane’s back made him cry out and arch and come in a glistening rope over Flint’s hand and his own belly and chest.

Every ache was suspended in temporary bliss as Vane sagged, boneless, to the bed.

“Christ,” Flint ground out, “I want to fuck you.”  
  
Vane’s answering whimper would never be spoken of thereafter, but he raised his top leg to invite Flint in, and Flint wasted no time divesting them both of their briefs and prepping him with thick, blunt fingers.

The scent of the lube he kept in the nightstand drawer roused an almost Pavlovian response in Vane, who used it sometimes to open himself, and he breathed out as Flint scissored his fingers inside of him and dragged his stubbled chin along the nape of Vane’s neck.

“Do it,” he ordered, and Flint slapped his hip with a lube-slick hand. “Who’s in charge here, anyway?” Flint asked.

Vane snorted, a sound that changed to a sharp moan as the head of Flint’s cock breached him.

One big hand held his thigh up while Flint pushed inside one slow inch at a time, until Vane was sure he’d be split asunder, riven open and left like that, full but broken.

Then Flint made a shallow thrust, all the motion that his position allowed, and dragged his cock over that spot inside Vane that made him cry out and shiver, wishing he hadn’t come just so he could do so then.

Again and again, ruthless in his focus, with maddeningly careful thrusts, Flint drove Vane to the brink of a second orgasm, his breath sobbing from him, ribs afire, ass full and heart swelling.

Then, Flint drove in hard the final time and stilled, seated against him, his breath a hot wash on Vane’s sweaty neck, he said, “Christ, I want to do this forever,” and spilled inside of him.

Vane moaned and came again, dry and so hard that fireworks burst behind his closed lids and he forgot how to breathe.

Only when Flint pulled out did Vane remember to inhale, a gusty, heaving breath that made him cough and his incision ache with it.

Flint stroked his hand along Vane’s flank and murmured nonsense to him while his eyes watered and he struggled to breathe without gasping.

Then Flint kissed him on the cheek, slid from the bed, and fetched a warm, wet cloth to clean him up.

Sated, weary beyond reason, pliant in Vane’s hands, he let himself be tucked under the covers once more and sighed as Flint kissed him almost chastely, saying, “Sleep.”

He wanted to protest that all he’d done is sleep, that Flint wasn’t the boss of him, that Vane could take care of himself.

What he actually said was, “I love you,” a raspy, breathless declaration that hung, appalling, in the air between them.

Then Flint was kissing him not at all chastely, tongue a sinuous, insistent rhythm that might have stirred him were he not punctured and already fuck-drunk.

“I love you, too, Captain Vane,” Flint whispered, raising shivers all along Vane’s skin.

There was so much to work out, so many ways it could all go disastrously wrong, but Vane couldn’t think of them in that moment, looking at the expression on Flint’s face, the love and trust there, the foolish, impossible hope.

“Go to sleep,” Flint murmured, kissing him lightly and pulling away. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

He’d never have the _Nassau_ again, never have his crew, but if he could have this man with the sea in his eyes, maybe Captain Charles Vane could, at last, be at peace on the land. It was a risk he was looking forward to taking.


End file.
